1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to opto-electronic device assemblies, and more specifically to the integrated and sealed packaging of opto-electronic devices which have optical cables, optoelectronic and electronic components in a case and mounted on a printed circuit board.
2. Description of Related Arts
Most computer and communication networks today rely on copper wire to transmit data between nodes in the network. Since the data transmitted over the copper wire and the data processed within the nodes are both represented in the form of electrical signals, the transfer of data at the node-copper wire interface is straight forward. Other than perhaps level shifts and signal amplification, no other signal processing is required for data transmitted over the copper wire to be decoded by the node. The drawback with using copper wire is its relatively narrower bandwidth. Copper's ability to transmit data is significantly limited compared to other mediums, such as fiber optics. Accordingly much of the computer and communication networks built today, including the Internet, are using fiber optic cable instead of copper wire.
With fiber optic cable, data is transmitted using light wave, rather than electrical signals. For example, a logical one (1) may be represented by a light pulse of a specific duration and a logical zero (0) may be represented by the absence of a light pulse for the same duration. In addition, it is also possible to transmit at the same time multiple colors of light over a single strand of optic fiber, with each color of light representing a distinct data stream. Since light is attenuated less in fiber than electrons traveling through copper, and multiple data streams can be transmitted at one time, the bandwidth of optic fiber is significantly greater than copper.
While fiber optic data transmission has proven very efficient, substantial problems have been encountered when applying these light signals to process data. Transferred data is typically stored in various locations before, during and after it is processed by a computer. Since there is currently no efficient technique to “store” these light packets of data, networks will likely continue to use fiber optics for transmitting data between nodes and silicon chips to process the data within the nodes for the foreseeable future. Building such networks requires opto-electronic transceivers, which connect optical transmission devices to electronic computing devices through devices that transform optical signals to electronic signals, and vice-versa.
Ideally, such opto-electronic transceivers should provide secured and reliable connections between the various devices and should be compact in size. Secured connections ensure that the individual devices do not disconnect and therefore cause a failure in the opto-electronic transformation process. Compactly sized transceiver modules allow a higher density of optical cables to be attached to an electronic printed circuit board, thereby increasing the bandwidth available to the computing system.
While the transceiver design adequately ensures a secure connection between optical and electronic devices, assembly of its individual sub-assemblies is mechanically complex.
In view of the foregoing, a simple and compact opto-electronic transceiver capable of providing secure connections between optical and electronic devices would be desirable.